Receiver-Operating-Characteristic Analysis Reveals Superiority of Scale-Dependent Wavelet and Spectral Measures for Assessing Cardiac Dysfunction

Receiver-operating-characteristic analysis was used to assess the suitability of various heart-rate variability (HRV) measures for correctly classifying electrocardiogram records of varying lengths as normal or revealing the presence of heart failure. Scale-dependent HRV measures were found to be substantially superior to scale-independent measures (scaling exponents) for discriminating the two classes of data over a broad range of record lengths (hours to minutes). A jittered integrate-and-fire model built around a fractal Gaussian-noise kernel provides a realistic, though not perfect, simulation of heartbeat sequences. [S0031-9007(98)08087-9]